


Of Dirigible Plums and Bad Proposals

by Evandar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: hp_goldenage, M/M, Mentions of Character Death, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-22 15:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13766940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: There’s a curse on the Weasley family: any man left unmarried by the age of fifty-five will die in a strange and, often, silly way. Ron’s not got much time left.





	Of Dirigible Plums and Bad Proposals

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to S for her work as beta, and to R for her role as sounding board, best friend, and coffee-dealer.

“And it – bloody hell, Harry – it was the worst date I’ve ever been on.”

Opposite him, Harry is laughing. It’s that soft chuckle he does where he hides his smile behind his hand and tries to make it look like he isn’t doing anything. But. It’s the laugh that Ron’s spent decades trying to elicit, so he knows the signs. He knows to watch out for the deepening of the crows’ feet in the corners of Harry’s eyes; the dimple that appears in Harry’s right cheek as his crooked smile widens behind his fingers; the tilt of his head and the way he turns his face away even as he keeps his gaze locked on Ron’s.

It’s the little things.

He grins back and leans forward slightly, sinking into the familiar role of storyteller. He sips his beer in between descriptions of his date’s various (lack of) charms and his own decided disinterest. He keeps his tone light and his smile wide and knows that Harry’s going to see his frustrations clear as day.

“What I don’t get,” Harry says when Ron finishes, “is why your Mum’s so insistent about you getting married _now_. I mean –” he pauses as his eyes rake over Ron’s body in a gesture that’s as coldly assessing as it is intimate. He’s been an auror for far too long for the way he looks at people to be entirely reassuring. “You’re not exactly young anymore,” he continues. “So why _now_?”

Ron sighs – he’s been waiting for that question.

“There’s a curse,” he says.

All traces of Harry’s amusement vanish. He straightens, his expression going hard and his eyes narrowing behind his glasses. He’s talking to the head of the DMLE now, not his best friend, and Ron hides the worst of his disappointment in his pint. 

“Well, apparently there’s a curse.” He looks down at his glass and the rings of moisture on the table. He traces a finger through them, and draws runes in the condensation. “Not sure if I really believe in it, myself, but Mum does and that’s what matters.” He glances up again. Harry is…back now, in a fashion. Still alert and wary and auror-like, but there’s a sympathetic twist to his lips that hadn’t been there before. Ron smiles back at him.

“So,” he says, taking another sip and trying not to feel like he’s in an interview room instead of a pub, “let’s go with old family legend. Old family legend says that there’s a curse that’ll, uh. That kills any Weasley man who isn’t married by the time they’re fifty-five.”

“Fifty-five?” Harry asks. “Ron, you’re…”

“Fifty-four, I know,” he says. He sighs again. “Look, it’s just a story.”

“Has anyone actually died from it?”

Fuck Harry and fuck how perceptive he is at times. He can be an oblivious little shit when it comes to people and the mystery of why they all flock to him, but when it comes to curses and dark arts and anything that isn’t about human interaction, he’s sharp as a cutting curse. Always has been, the sod. Which is why Ron wants to lie to him, right now, and tell him that it _is_ just a story. 

But.

“Remember when I told you about Uncle Bilius?” he asks. “Back in third year, you know, with the whole grim-thing.”

Harry nods slowly. 

“He was fifty-five,” Ron says. “Saw the grim and it made him so bloody paranoid that he drowned himself with a tooth-brushing charm.”

“What the -?”

“That’s the thing, see,” he says. “The, er, deaths are always a bit. You know. Weird. Daft. Drowning yourself with a tooth-brushing charm or, uh –” he wracks his brain trying to remember some of the others, “or being scared to death on the loo by a ghost rising up through the pipes, or choking on a dirigible plum. That guy was found by his brother floating around the ceiling two days later. Stuff like that. Daft stuff.”

“But deadly,” Harry finishes. He runs a hand through his hair. The sunlight streaming through the pub window picks out every strand of silver and turns it gold. Ron swallows and busies himself with his drink again, reluctant to look away but not entirely willing to be caught looking when Harry’s in auror-mode like this.

“Look, it’s probably just a load of bollocks,” Ron says. “I mean, how on earth do you get cursed to die stupidly if you’re single? Who would come up with that?”

Harry shrugs. “You’d be surprised,” he says, and Ron knows that, actually, he probably would. 

He knows that Harry doesn’t tell him about all of his cases. They’ve been best friends for years, but they don’t live in each other’s pockets anymore – not like they used to in school. He misses it sometimes, but he knows that there are legal reasons that stop Harry from talking about the majority of the things he deals with, just as much as he knows that listening to the daily minutiae of running the shop would bore Harry to tears. There’s a balance involved: Harry shares stories about co-workers instead of convicts, and Ron only tells him about the weirder customers that come through the doors: the girls he caught shoplifting love potions and the boy who decided to chew on some of the Peruvian Darkness Powder.

Instead of saying anything, he shrugs. “Dunno, mate, but I think I’d rather take my chances with a curse than a date with another one of Mum’s, er, ‘nice girls’.”

The last one, Imelda, had been a little terrifying, actually. And if it’s a future with her or death-by-dirigible plum, he knows hands-down which one he’d go for.

Harry would probably say something at his funeral. It would be the worst speech on earth, because Harry’s awful at speaking in public, but it would at least be heartfelt when he’d call Ron a pillock in front of assembled friends and relatives.

“Why the hell are you smiling about this?” Harry asks. 

Ron grins just a little wider. “No reason,” he says. 

Harry kicks him under the table. “Would an arranged marriage work?” he asks. “Or, you know, one of convenience or something.”

Ron raises his eyebrows. “Dunno,” he replies. “Probably, if all the curse is looking for is a signature and a ring on your finger or whatever. But –” he cuts off, shrugging. He doesn’t know for sure if that would do the trick.

And, really, the daft thing is, he could have been married by now. There’ve been flings over the years – brief romances with an assortment of partners, and some of them could have become serious enough to lead to marriage. And Ron’s fairly confident that in some of them he could have been happy; he could have made his partner happy. But – and it’s a big but – the problem is that he’s a Weasley. He’s a bloody romantic deep down, and the only person he’s ever actually _wanted_ to marry is the oblivious twat sitting opposite him.

He’s loved Harry since he was eleven. Since that first bloody journey to Hogwarts, when he made an arse of himself by asking about Harry’s scar and his dead parents and the scruffy little kid that Harry had been had just flashed his dimple and his crooked smile and – 

Yeah. He’s bloody hopeless. Has been for forty-odd years.

Harry’s drumming his fingers on the table. It’s not a steady rhythm – there’s always a delay between the second and third fingers, and there has been ever since he had to regrow half his hand after an incident when he was twenty-six.

It’s hopeless that he knows that.

“I’m going to be fine, mate,” he says. “I always am, you know?”

“Except I really don’t want to stand in front of all your relatives and talk about how great you were when you died from… an infection from your own toenail clippings or whatever, you utter prat,” Harry replies. “Do you have any idea how –”

He stops. He looks away. And there’s a dull flush spreading up the pale stretch of his neck and across the sweep of his cheekbones and, greying and lined as he is, Ron doesn’t think he’s ever seen Harry look more wonderful.

“Do you have any idea how much it would hurt to lose you?” Harry asks. He asks it so quietly that Ron – if he hadn’t been paying attention – wouldn’t have heard him over the noise of the bar.

There’s not much he can say to that. It’s not something he’s really thought about. His _mother_ ’s made it perfectly clear that he’d be missed, but Ginny and his brothers are all of the same mind he is – that the curse is a load of superstitious nonsense and that Mum’s just finally snapped about one of her babies _still_ being single. (Charlie, the traitor, had left him the only one unattached when he went and married a bloody vampire.) And he knows that if their positions were reversed that he would miss Harry like nothing else on earth, but… Harry’s Harry. Harry’s _important_. Harry’s the one who’s gone and died before and left Ron with, for the space of about an hour, the kind of nerve-shattering grief that _still_ haunts his nightmares. 

He’s never really thought about Harry missing him. He’s…just Ron, after all. Ron Weasley. No one of any sort of special significance, in the end.

He swallows. He opens his mouth and then closes it again without making a sound. Harry looks up at him from the corner of his eye. He’s chewing his lip, the way he always does when he’s upset, and as Ron watches, he tears just enough of the skin to make himself bleed.

“Never – never really thought about it,” he says. “But –”

Harry looks at him. Even with blood beading at the corner of his mouth, he looks calm. Decisive. Like – oh _hell_ \- like he’s decided to do something stupid like charge into a basilisk-filled chamber on a rescue mission, or chase after a dark lord or a philosopher’s stone.

(That expression, he knows, has had Harry written up on more non-compliance sheets than any other auror in history. That expression has, on the other hand, been known to get results. Every time. There’s no arguing with that expression.)

“Harry, no,” he says. It’s futile and he knows it.

“Harry, yes,” Harry argues, and Ron knows exactly what he’s going to say before he says it. “I’m marrying you.”

Ron doesn’t know whether to cheer or go and find a dirigible plum to choke on. Marrying Harry is a dream come true, but –

“Harry, no, I’m not going – I’m not going to marry you just because Mum’s convinced herself I’m going to snuff it on my next birthday.”

“Why not?” Harry says, and there’s that – that _gleam_ in his eyes that means he knows fine well he’s going to win this out of sheer bloody-mindedness and that Ron should just shut up and get with the program already. “There’s nothing wrong with –”

“I know there’s nothing wrong with it!” Ron shouts. The noise of the bar subsides and he ducks his head automatically, avoiding every single gaze that falls on him until the conversations around them pick back up again. He takes a drink. He looks back up. Harry is staring at him. 

“I know there’s nothing wrong with it,” Ron tells him. “But just because there _might_ be a curse, and just because we _could_ , theoretically, get married to each other, it doesn’t mean that we _should_. ‘Just because’ is –”

“Exactly why we should do it,” Harry counters.

Forty-odd years into their friendship and Ron might know all of Harry’s ticks and tells like the back of his hand, but he’ll be damned if he knows the slightest thing about how Harry’s mind works.

“What?” he asks.

Harry shrugs. “We don’t really know any other single people our age anymore, apart from your Mum’s secret stockpile of attractive widows,” he says. “And Malfoy, I suppose.”

“ _No_ ,” Ron says. “Just don’t even –”

“And,” Harry cuts him off before he can really get going, which is unfortunate, because a rant about Malfoy would be a great way to change the subject. “And we’re friends, best friends, so we know each other probably a bit too well as it is, and we know we can put up with each other. And, Ron, we’ve done far worse things than get married because of ‘just because’ – curse or no curse.”

“I’m not going to let you sacrifice yourself for me _again_ ,” Ron tells him.

Harry blinks. He licks the blood off his lower lip and looks down at his drink as if that point of view genuinely hadn’t occurred to him. 

“Sacrifice what, exactly?” he asks after a moment, his voice all low and soft again. “My crap flat that I’ve lived in since graduation, and a solitary life of takeaways and too much coffee? An approaching retirement where I get to hang around the department like Moody used to because I went from being a kid who lived in a cupboard to a war veteran without actually figuring out how to be human in between? Bloody _hell_ , Ron, I don’t know _how_ I could give that up for a chance of – of, you know, being happy with someone I actually bloody care about.”

Oh.

He hadn’t realised Harry even thought of himself that way. Hadn’t thought about the odd hours and the secrecy and how, come to think about it, the last person Harry had dated was _Ginny_.

“Actually,” Harry says, “it’s more like I love you. Always did, really.” He clears his throat and nods at the empty glass still cupped in Ron’s hand. “Want another drink?”

Ron stares at him – at the person he’d though he had figured out years ago. He shakes his head slowly.

“Nah,” he says. He takes a deep breath. “I figure we should probably get to the registry office before it closes, though.”

It’s entirely unfair how _Harry_ gets to stare at _him_ like he’s some weirdo from another planet and not the other way around.

“What?”

Ron grins at him. “You’re bloody crap at proposing, mate, but you’ve got a point,” he says. “And this is me saying yes, by the way. So. If you want to –”

Harry downs the rest of his pint and stands up. He’s smiling that sweet, crooked smile that stole Ron’s heart in the first place and, when he ducks round the table to get to Ron’s side, he reaches out to lace their fingers together like it’s the most natural thing in the world. And…

Yeah. Maybe it is.

**Author's Note:**

> This work is a part of an anonymous fest and the creator will be revealed no later than March 30. Please comment here or at [our community on Dreamwidth.](https://hp-goldenage.dreamwidth.org/62033.html) Thanks! ♥


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